About
In 2002,
Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie began intensive and systematic field survey in the northern Afar region of Ethiopia and after 3 years of surveying, he found a fossiliferous site and formed the Woranso-Mille paleoanthropological research project (WORMIL) in 2005.
The Woranso-Mille paleontological site is located in the western part of the central Afar depression and about 35 km north of Hadar, Gona, and Dikika, and shares its southern border with Ledi-Geraru.
Since then, more than 100 vertebrate paleontological localities have been designated with close to 12,000 fossil specimens cataloged, including >200 hominin fossils. The faunal assemblage includes more than 85 mammalian species, with most of the specimens recovered from sediments dated to between 3.0 and 3.82 Ma.
The WORMIL project has recovered some of the most important hominin fossils known to paleoanthropology, including a partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis ("Kadanuumuu"), an as-yet-unnamed partial foot ("Burtele Foot") that proved multiple modes of locomotion in middle Pliocene hominins, Australopithecus deyiremeda - a new hominin species that co-existed with Australopithecus afarensis in Woranso-Mille, and the most recent find - a remarkably complete cranium of Australopithecus anamensis.
To see a photo gallery of fieldwork at Woranso-Mille, please click here.